William Betts’ paintings are wonders of both art and technology. And yes, they can be plenty unsettling, on several levels.

Betts captures still images, singular frozen moments, culled randomly from the millions of hours of video recorded by the security cameras that watch our every move.

Then he programs the images into a smart and precise painting machine that re-creates the scene in tiny, pixelated dots.

It’s your world, stolen by a machine, appropriated by another machine. From a few feet away it’s a distant and cold effort. At once a surrender to and a condemnation of Big Brother’s comprehensive occupation of contemporary life.

But things are different up close. There you can see Betts’ tiny little dots individually. You can appreciate his skill in mapping them out, in choosing their odd colors: pinks, navy blues, periwinkles, tangerines. You can feel the hand of a human in the process, the control of an individual in the final product.

These are creepy works, for sure, but the paintings assembled into the show titled “Remote Sensing” at Plus Gallery, can also be — in some small way — comforting.

You don’t come away with the idea that people control their own destiny, or that there’s any such thing as privacy or security. There is a sense, however, that the content of our modern world is a joint effort. Cameras may create it and computers may render it, but an artist can also make it his own. Betts captures the capturers, watches the watchers.

That said, it takes a while to find the soul of this work, and first you have to move through the eerie nature of

The scenes are specific to our daily lives, but overwhelmingly anonymous. You can’t make out a face or location or even the race of the people caught on tape. It could be your cubicle captured in Betts’ “Office” or our own DIA in his “Crowd” paintings.

Who is recording these details and why? Do our employers watch us at the office, or is it the police, or some insurance company?

Betts doesn’t answer the questions, though he must know since he procures the video from someone, somewhere. He keeps us distant at all times, lets this mystery define our experience with his work.

It’s not an entirely effective device. This withholding doesn’t endear him to us; he’s almost part of the problem. It might be easier to appreciate his work if we felt like he was on our side.

Where he wins us over, however, is in his technique. The little dots are so clean and the way they come together to form a whole is shrewd. These are intelligent works. The software, which Houston-based Betts developed himself, is impressive. We are suckers for the whiz-bang, and the fact that he employs it for his art — and not in the service of making sure we all behave — allows him the benefit of the doubt.

In the end, you get to have mixed feelings about both the artist and the paintings. They are the same twisted emotions we experience with TSA screenings or the security cameras positioned on stoplights or ATMs.